


Claw Your Way Up

by perniciousLizard



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Mental Illness, Post-Pacifist Route
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-05-20 22:57:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6028579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perniciousLizard/pseuds/perniciousLizard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alphys climbs out of the pit she put herself in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Claw Your Way Up

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for day thirteen of a "change" themed 30 Day challenge. The whole challenge is [here](https://alloftheseprompts.wordpress.com/2015/12/30/30-day-challenge-writing-about-change/) and all the entries I've finished are [here](http://it-refused.tumblr.com/tagged/30-day-change).

Sometimes, when it was really _really_ bad, it was like no time had passed at all.  She was back in the basement lab again and everything had gone wrong and no one could know.  

Those things had happened.  She had done them.  There was no reversing time and fixing it, or changing herself into a person who hadn’t done those things.  She couldn’t even turn herself into someone who had immediately owned up to what happened.  

It got pretty bad when she was alone and she let herself think.  TV was amazing, because you could just shut everything off and enjoy it or get angry at it, or, well, whatever you felt like!  Then she would have to try to go to sleep, and it just wouldn’t work or it would work too well and she wouldn’t want to get out of bed, ever.  

She knew, or she understood on some level on her worst days, that there were people who loved her, who cared about her, and who wanted to see her be happy.  Those people were important.  She knew that the families of the people she had…hurt…they forgave her, too.  And most of the people themselves, they had made peace with what they had become and were just happy to be with their families again and not stuck in a dirty lonely basement.  

But the people who cared about her, did they really know her?  Did they really get what she had done, what she _was_ , to have done that?  

It was like she was still there, in her head: in that basement, putting out food for sad and lonely monsters who just wanted to go home.  

But when she scraped and clawed her way out of that pit, she would stand there on the edge of it, dazed, blinking in the sunlight.  

She was still that Alphys who had done terrible things, and she couldn’t change the past, but she was different now.  She was an Alphys who had told everyone what had happened, done what was possible to make it better, and who had let everyone be mad at her even though it hurt.  

Wallowing in her misery and guilt, however deserved, hadn’t actually fixed anything.  Hating herself hadn’t fixed anything.  She had to think she could be better, and then she _could_ be better.  

Maybe she wasn’t a good person, not really, but maybe it was all right that people cared about her.  Maybe she didn’t deserve it, at least not how _much_ they cared, but she was going to selfishly accept it anyway.  Being loved made her keep wanting to be better.  

She had to keep trying to be better.   She was starting to really like the sunlight.  


End file.
